Resident Satisfaction Survey (EBI)- check your email!

The Resident Satisfaction Survey (EBI) is your chance to tell Residential Life how we are doing!  The survey contains questions regarding many aspects of living on campus.  We need your feedback to make your campus experience the best it can be!  Please take the time to fill out this survey that will come to you via email.  Thanks!

Available Prizes:

·         First 100 people to complete the survey will win a free food or beverage coupon for an on campus vendor

·         All participants are entered to win:

o   Up to $200 in food funds

o   Priority for a single room during housing selection

·        Top 3 participating residence halls (by %) and Top 3 participating apartments (by %) residents of those communities will be entered to win a Kindle Fire tablet computer

So stand up and SPEAK!  Look for your email!

Please join Residential Life in celebrating the opening of the West wing of the Patapsco community! 

Monday, November 14, 2011

4PM

Patapsco West Community Room

Tours include:

Highlights of Sustainable Features

Student Rooms

Community Spaces in all Wings

Light refreshments will be served.  Join us at True Grits for dinner with a featured chef following the open house. 

The countdown is on for one of the most anticipated days of the year. You guessed it. BLACK FRIDAY! Known as the official start of the holiday shopping season, Black Friday was first acknowledged back in 1966 when the Philadelphia Police Department noticed a significant increase in both pedestrian and vehicle traffic in the shopping districts of the city. It was given the name “Black Friday” to indicate a time when retailers typically turn a serious profit, moving from the red to the black. As most Americans have the day after Thanksgiving off, Black Friday is known as the busiest shopping day of the year.

So if you dare to stay up all night and fight the crowds to find the best deals, you could really save big this Black Friday. Here are some websites I found with great tips for getting the best deals.

http://couponing.about.com/od/seasonalsavingszone/p/blackfriday.htm

http://frugalliving.about.com/od/christmas/tp/Black_Friday_Tips.htm

http://www.blackfriday2011.com/

Article by Alison Ginder

Happy shopping!!!  Please share any comments about WHAT you are thankful for this season and/or whether or not you will be brave enough to join the crowds for Black Friday and WHERE you will go to shop!

EE Graduate Seminar

Stochastic Graph Grammars

Prof. Tim Oates
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, UMBC

11:30am Friday November 11, ITE 231, UMBC

Many important domains are naturally described relationally, often using graphs in which nodes correspond to entities and edges to relations. Stochastic graph grammars compactly represent probability distributions over graphs and can be learned from data, such as a set of graphs corresponding to proteins that have the same function.

In this talk we consider the problem of learning the parameters (i.e., the production probabilities) of stochastic graph grammars and the structure of the grammar (i.e., the productions) given a representative sample of graphs taken from the underlying distribution. We also present efficient algorithms for computing properties of the distribution over graphs defined by a graph grammar such as expectations of graph size, node degree, and number of edges.

Dr. Tim Oates is an Associate Professor in the CSEE Department at UMBC. He received B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1989, and M.S. and PhD degrees from the Univ of Massachusetts Amherst in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Prior to coming to UMBC in Fall 2001, Prof. Oates spent a year as a postdoc in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

EE Graduate Seminar

Stochastic Graph Grammars

Prof. Tim Oates
Associate Professor of Computer Science
Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, UMBC

11:30am Friday November 11, ITE 231, UMBC

Many important domains are naturally described relationally, often using graphs in which nodes correspond to entities and edges to relations. Stochastic graph grammars compactly represent probability distributions over graphs and can be learned from data, such as a set of graphs corresponding to proteins that have the same function.

In this talk we consider the problem of learning the parameters (i.e., the production probabilities) of stochastic graph grammars and the structure of the grammar (i.e., the productions) given a representative sample of graphs taken from the underlying distribution. We also present efficient algorithms for computing properties of the distribution over graphs defined by a graph grammar such as expectations of graph size, node degree, and number of edges.

Dr. Tim Oates is an Associate Professor in the CSEE Department at UMBC. He received B.S. degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from North Carolina State University in 1989, and M.S. and PhD degrees from the Univ of Massachusetts Amherst in 1997 and 2000, respectively. Prior to coming to UMBC in Fall 2001, Prof. Oates spent a year as a postdoc in the Artificial Intelligence Lab at MIT.

Host: Prof. Joel M. Morris

Thanks to Politico!

Ohio’s closely watched ballot initiative, Issue 2, was defeated on Election Day. The vote stops a recent anti-union bill from becoming law.

If passed, the law would have limited the bargaining rights of public employees, including police officers and firefighters. Republican Gov. John Kasich faced backlash for his support of the measure.

Ohio sent a message to every politician out there: Go in and make war on your employees rather than make jobs with your employees, and you do so at your own peril.

Issue 2 was one of many talked-about votes as Americans headed to the polls.

Image from Reuters

Wave goodbye: Italy’s Prime Minister on his way out.

This train don’t stop: Cain vows to stay in the race.

Can you find me now? GPS tracking worries highest court.

Heaven getting heavy? Rapper Heavy D dies.

And, is there anything that can’t be live-tweeted?!